US embassy cable - 05GUATEMALA312

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 GUATEMALA 000312 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV, PHUM, ETRD, EAID, ASEC, MASS, SNAR, SENV, KCOR, GT 
SUBJECT: LETTER FROM GUATEMALA (6) 
 
REF: GUATEMALA 0294 
 
Another painful anniversary noted 
--------------------------------- 
 
1.  (SBU) January 31 marked the 25th anniversary of the fire 
at the Spanish Embassy that killed 37 persons.  In a land 
that has suffered more than its share of grim tragedies over 
the last 50 years, this particular incident remains vividly 
controversial.  Bishop Gonzalo de Villa, former head of 
Landivar University, lost his mother, who was taking care of 
some paperwork that day in the Spanish Embassy.  Also killed 
in the fire was the father of Nobel Peace Prize winner 
Rigoberta Menchu.  He had led a small group of indigenous 
from Uspantan, Quiche, to Guatemala City to protest delays in 
land redistribution.  There are conflicting versions of how 
events unfolded that day, but whether by invitation or 
deceit, the indigenous ended up at the Spanish Embassy along 
with some radical students and some visiting VIPs, including 
a former vice president.  When the military government got 
wind of the "peaceful takeover" at the Embassy, security 
forces were deployed to rescue the embassy and the 
"hostages." 
 
2.  (SBU) Critics of the military regime believe the forces 
set off the fire while storming the embassy.  Others say the 
fire was set off by students inside the embassy who lobbed 
molotov cocktails to deter the security forces.  In any case, 
37 persons died inside the diplomatic mission that day. 
Quite a few people here hold Spanish Ambassador Cajal y 
Lopez, who escaped with his life, responsible for the 
tragedy, citing evidence that he invited the protestors to 
the embassy and masterminded the "peaceful takeover" to 
embarrass the regime.  The facts were never clarified, as the 
government closed its investigation about a month after the 
fire, leading many people to hold the president, General 
Lucas Garcia, and his security team responsible. 
 
3.  (SBU) Recently, however, a Spanish court resurrected 
hopes that justice might be done by requesting the 
extradition from Mexico of Donaldo Alvarez, who as Interior 
Minister at the time, had overseen the storming of the 
embassy. 
 
The bishop gets some security 
----------------------------- 
 
4.  (SBU) In a recent letter, we reported that Bishop Alvaro 
Ramazzini had locked horns with President Berger over the 
issue of strip mining for gold.  We noted the makings of a 
rapprochement, as Berger and VP Stein met with Ramazzini, and 
they agreed to work together on a new mining law.  Over the 
ensuing weekend, however, Ramazzini was once again in the 
press, this time because of press reports that an unnamed 
former officer of the EMP, the military's now-dismantled 
presidential security staff, claimed an unidentified woman 
had offered him $50,000 to assassinate Bishop Ramazzini.  The 
threat against Ramazzini conjured up memories of the unsolved 
1998 murder of Bishop Gerardi.  Although it was never 
determined whether that murder was a crime of passion, 
politics, or lucre, it gave the Arzu administration a black 
eye.  Perhaps with that in mind, the Berger administration 
quickly reached out to its erstwhile antagonist and offered 
him his choice of protection by the police, presidential 
security, or armed private bodyguards.  The bishop, who said 
he was no stranger to death threats but felt alarmed by this 
plot, accepted the offer of presidential security, which was 
very much in evidence at Ramazzini's most recent public 
appearances. 
 
Mining Issue: Truce with the Church in Sight? 
-------------------------------------------- 
 
5. (SBU) Berger's war of words with Bishop Ramazzini 
escalated when Cardinal Quezada Toruno and the Episcopal 
Conference rallied to the Bishop's defense.  Quezada used 
Sunday Mass on January 23 to declare solidarity with 
Ramazzini's position against open-pit mining and criticize 
Berger for accusations that were "false and unjust."  Media 
commentators joined the fray, with a few supporting the 
bishops' principled position while others dug up the Church's 
history in Guatemala of political involvement and called on 
the Church to stick to more spiritual matters.  Vice 
President Stein (who was, once upon a time, a Jesuit 
seminarian) quietly engaged in the dialogue after President 
Human Rights Commissioner Frank Larue, apparently 
freelancing, called for a national dialogue and high-level 
commission to review mining policy. 
 
6. (SBU) Since then, the issue has slowly faded from the 
headlines -- neither side retracting anything said but 
refraining from attacking the other.  The acting president of 
business association CACIF told us February 3 that "moderate" 
bishops within the Episcopal Conference asserted themselves 
to insist on a middle ground that would permit responsible 
mining as a way to generate income in poor areas.  That same 
night, Berger and a number of his Cabinet were conspicuously 
present at the opening of the new Ecclesiastical Museum, and 
a beaming Cardinal and the President graced the front page of 
"Diario de Centro America," the official government 
newspaper.  The compromise appears to be that existing 
contracts will be respected, and that changes to the mining 
law will be reviewed. 
 
Portillo's finance minister goes to trial 
----------------------------------------- 
 
7.  (SBU) PolCouns and FSN Political assistant attended the 
opening of the trial of Eduardo Weymann, the former finance 
minister under the Portillo administration who has been 
charged with document fraud and embezzlement.  Weymann's case 
is the first of several high-profile cases involving Portillo 
officials, including his vice president and the head of the 
internal revenue service (SAT), to be tried in court.  Some 
critics have complained that over the past year the 
prosecutor's office has devoted too much effort to going 
after the Portillo officials, alleging that the motivation 
was political.  The first morning of the Weymann trial left 
us with the impression that the special prosecutor for 
corruption, Celvin Galindo, may not have much of a case.  The 
39-year-old Weymann, who was the wunderkind of the Portillo 
team, has been under arrest since April 23 for signing the 
minutes of a meeting that never took place.  The minutes 
purport to document that the SAT board had authorized on 
December 30, 2003, the transfer of all remaining funds from 
the SAT budget to the "office supplies" account, which then 
financed a year-end buying spree of almost $5 million in 
office supplies from a number of fake companies.  The money 
ended up not in Weymann's pockets but in those of the SAT 
superintendent, Marco Tulio Abadio Molina and his family 
members.  The office supplies never materialized. 
 
8.  (SBU) With great fanfare, the prosecution called its 
first expert witness, a handwriting expert (who claimed he 
had been trained by, among others, the U.S. Department of 
Justice).  The prosecutor and two of his associates then 
tried everyone's patience by getting the handwriting expert 
to confirm repeatedly, but by means of different 
formulations, that the signature on the minutes was indeed 
Weymann's.  The defense attorney then popped the prosecutor's 
bubble by stating, in one brief declarative sentence, that 
her client had never denied signing the minutes.  Weymann 
recently changed attorneys, claiming publicly that he had 
been ill served by his previous counsel.  Word on the street 
is that Weymann wanted to distance himself from crack 
criminal attorney Fernando "Skippy" Linares during public 
proceedings because Linares is best known for representing 
organized crime boss Ortega Menaldo and having his U.S. visa 
yanked.  Weymann did not look far afield, however:  his new 
attorney is a partner in Skippy's firm. 
 
9.  (SBU) In cross-examining the next three witnesses, an 
auditor and two members of the SAT board, it became clear 
that the real culprit was Abadio, and the prosecutor was 
going to have a very difficult time proving Weymann had 
benefited or intended to benefit from Abadio's scam or had 
wittingly participated in it.  Weymann has already been 
punished, to the extent that he has been tried and convicted 
in the press and has spent nine months in jail.  It should 
also be noted that the judge originally presiding over this 
case (who died in a December traffic accident) set the bail 
for Weymann at almost $5 million, the same amount that Abadio 
allegedly took from this scheme.  Weymann was unable to meet 
bail, and many observers attributed the exceptionally high 
amount (by Guatemalan standards) as proof that the case had 
been politicized. 
 
FRG portraying GANA successors as inept 
--------------------------------------- 
 
10.  (SBU) We had breakfast February 3 with FRG leaders Zury 
Rios Montt, Antonio Arenales and Aristides Crespo.  Arenales 
is the new head of the External Relations Committee in 
Congress and Crespo is head of the FRG bloc, so we impressed 
upon them the importance of moving with alacrity on the new 
data protection bill that the Berger administration sent in 
tandem with the CAFTA bill to Congress January 28.  They, on 
the other hand, were quite eager to impress upon us the 
dilatory treatment given to the legislation by the 
congressional leadership, headed by Congress President Jorge 
Mendez Herbruger (JMH) of the governing GANA coalition. 
According to these FRG leaders, who took credit for helping 
JMH get the presidency of the congress, he had been quite the 
ingrate with them.  They believed the generics bill had not 
yet had its first reading in plenary because JMH, having 
alienated some of his own bloc members, was now tiptoeing on 
eggshells.  That said, they expected the bill and CAFTA would 
be read in Congress later that day and assigned to committee 
(which indeed occurred), and they committed to support both. 
 
 
11.  (SBU) The Ambassador took the opportunity to press 
Arenales on prospects for congressional approval of the new 
and improved agreement for an office of the High Commissioner 
on Human Rights.  Arenales noted that the government had not 
yet sent the agreement to Congress but that he had 
unofficially seen the text of the agreement.  Arenales, who 
had been the leading opponent last year to the previous OHCHR 
agreement, said his juridical and political points of 
objection had been addressed and did not anticipate problems 
in gaining congressional approval of the agreement.  The 
Ambassador also urged quick action on an Article 98 
agreement.  Arenales noted that the administration had not 
yet sent it to Congress but assured the Ambassador that it 
would be approved by his committee.  He said the risk for 
Article 98 was that the Human Rights Committee might insist 
on reviewing it and could issue a recommendation against it. 
 
 
ANN fissures cause Nineth to lose a perch 
----------------------------------------- 
 
12.  (SBU) We met with Nineth Montenegro, who was recently 
declared "Person of the Year" for 2004 by leading daily 
newspaper Prensa Libre.  Montenegro, whose first husband was 
a casualty of the internal armed conflict, is a prominent 
human rights activist who has used her seat in Congress to 
become a formidable watchdog on the military budget.  Indeed, 
Montenegro deserves much credit for exposing some major 
corruption among the military and guiding the government's 
successful efforts to open up the military budget to public 
scrutiny.  Unlike so many of her colleagues, Montenegro is a 
serious, hard-working interlocutor whose discretion we 
greatly appreciate. 
 
13.  (SBU) We were therefore somewhat disappointed to see 
Montenegro forced out of her chairmanship of the Human Rights 
Committee in Congress as a result of a deepening split among 
the six members of her left-of-center ANN bloc, headed by 
former guerrilla Pablo Monsanto.  Committee chairmanships are 
doled out to parties to decide, and in the case of the Human 
Rights Committee, the ANN decided to take the committee 
chairmanship away from Montenegro and give it to Maria 
Reinhardt.  Montenegro is by far the most popular of the ANN 
deputies and has struck an increasingly moderate stance, even 
publicly declaring herself to be a "centrist," much to the 
annoyance of Monsanto, who was active in the bloodiest 
faction of the URNG and is believed to have participated in 
the 1968 assassination of U.S. Ambassador Mein.  People here 
are speculating about when, not if, Montenegro and her two 
ANN allies will leave the ANN and in which party they might 
end up.  Perhaps as a result of her ANN experience, 
Montenegro is now advocating legislation to force parties to 
adopt greater transparency and internal democracy. 
 
HAMILTON